Steller's Orchid

By Tom McGuire

In 1924, Yale student John Lars Nelson takes ship on the SS Victoria, bound for Nome. He has been hired to do a plant survey, but his real mission is to find an orchid described by Georg Wilhelm Steller, the naturalist on Vitus Bering’s 1741 expedition. On the ship, John Lars encounters a young Aleut woman, Natasha Christiansen. Once in Nome he hires a pair of down-at-the-heels bootleggers to take him to the Shumagin Islands on their schooner, the Emilia Galotti. He quickly discovers that the two are not what they first seemed. In Bristol Bay he again encounters Natasha and she joins them but she and John are marooned shortly thereafter. They cross the Alaskan Peninsula on foot and then in a borrowed skiff reach Nagai Island, where Bering made his landfall two centuries before. They find the Emilia there, along with another ship, and the hunt for the orchid brings to a violent resolution an intrigue started many years before.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Boreal Books
• Release date: Jun 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781597098281

Tom McGuire

Tom McGuire came to Alaska with two college friends. Fifty years later he still hasn’t found reason to leave. He has worked as a salmon fisherman, carpenter, and North Slope oilfield worker. He and his wife have raised four children in a house they built on the banks of the Chilkoot River. Grizzly bears are frequent visitors. Tom has also paddled thousands of miles down (and up) northern rivers. He has published a book 99 Days on the Yukon, that describes a summerlong trip with legendary canoeist Charlie Wolf.